A reliability evaluation model of rolling bearings based on WKN-BiGRU and Wiener process

• A hybrid WKN-BiGRU and Wiener process model is proposed for reliability evaluation of rolling bearing. • A hybrid WKN-BiGRU model is utilized to deep feature extraction and health index construction. • The Wiener process has been introduced to model the health index for reliability evaluation. Reliability evaluation is highly significant for the safe and reliable service of rolling bearings. It is to accurately reflect degradation states of rolling bearings. However, traditional methods have difficulties in solving the problems resulted from the lack of measured data, while the deep learning techniques are insufficient in dealing with uncertainties. This paper proposes a new reliability evaluation schedule based on the WaveletKernelNet (WKN), bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU), and Wiener process model. The proposed method consists of two parts: a health index construction model by the WKN-BiGRU and a Wiener process-based reliability evaluation method. The WKN-BiGRU network is to extract deep features and construct the health index of the rolling bearings. The Wiener process is to achieve the reliability evaluation of rolling bearings and to quantify uncertainties. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is confirmed by a real case study of rolling bearings. Overall, the proposed methodology contributes to effectively deep features extraction and reliability estimation of rolling bearings.